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by pervycreeper 2824 days ago
>Amazon has no literary opinion

This is not exactly true. Amazon has removed books from its publishing platform based on their content, and even makes pseudo-literary judgements by forbidding "placeholder" or "dummy" text.

2 comments

Neither of those is a matter of literary opinion. A book full of Markov-chain gibberish created to receive KDP revenue, or to serve in a money laundering scheme, is not a work of literature -- it's an instrument of fraud. Removing these books is simply a (entirely reasonable) business decision.

I'm not sure what you're thinking of in particular when you mention books removed "based on their content", but I can think of any number of scenarios where this is, again, a perfectly reasonable decision.

We might not be seeing major issues now, but I think it would be fairly easy to foresee one or two major publishing cartels controlling all publications as things continue to consolidate with internet powerhouses. Sounds absolutely ripe for censorship concerns.
It's funny to think that there have been randomly-generated books that readers considered to have value -- like the RAND million random digits book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Million_Random_Digits_with_1...

I'm also thinking that a couple of the Oulipo works (perhaps some of those by François Le Lionnais?) had randomly generated contents -- within schemata or grammars created by the authors, of course.

But I guess this is the exception rather than the rule.